Many patients these days take more than one medicine or dietary supplement. Each medicine or dietary supplement may have its own rules for consumption, such as, for example, the frequency, the time of day, and the accompanying food or beverage (or absence thereof). For some patients, managing even one once-daily medicine can be challenging: it is possible to forget whether the daily dose has been consumed. When a patient must manage more than one medicine, each with its own rules for consumption, the likelihood for confusion, missed doses, overdose, and general noncompliance by the patient increases. Those problems at best reduce the efficacy of the medicine, and at worst, place the patient at significant risk for untreated illness and drug-related injury.
Medicine-dispensing devices have been proposed before. Solid dosage forms such as pills, however, can jam inside the dispensing device. If the jam is not resolved properly, the jammed pills can be damaged by the device, such as by chipping or crushing the pills. Worse, the device can be damaged as it continues to operate, applying force against jammed pills. The device may also become contaminated with residue from damaged pills. Most importantly, the patient may receive less medicine by consuming a damaged pill, or no medicine at all, if the jam prevents any pill from being dispensed.
Previous medicine-dispensing devices have made it difficult or impossible to adjust the dimensions of the device to accommodate different medicines and nutraceuticals. Pills, tablets, capsules, and gel capsules may have different physical dimensions, yet most devices have used a one-size-fits-all approach to separating one solid dosage form from a plurality of stored solid dosage forms. That means an entire device is limited to a single size and shape of solid dosage form, or the device attempts to handle diverse solid dosage forms. Such devices may be unsatisfactory for a given patient's medicine and dietary supplement regimen, because they cannot handle all of the solid dosage forms required by the regimen.